Anit-Spam measures

Anyone that's ever left an ExpressionEngine website with user registration open unattended for a while, knows that spam member signups can be a real hassle.

Most spambots attacking EE’s member registration will be used to EE’s built in registration form – and thus POST to /member/register. So, just by placing your registration form elsewhere you’ve already done a great deal to minimize spam signups. And by default, Simple Registration will block the /member/register endpoint, unless you changed that setting in the config file.

However, as we all know spammers are sneaky – so we have added some sneaky anti-spam functionality to Simple Registration; a honeypot field and input name rewrites.

Honeypot Field

The Honeypot Field is a simple setting in the config file that tells Simple Registration the name of some input that should never be filled out. So, basically you can say that "username" is a honeypot field - so, if it is filled, Simple Registration won't create a new user.

$config['simple_registration_global_honeypot_field'] = 'username';

A spambot will typically fill out any field called "username" (or "email") and thus be denied. In your form you can hide this field using CSS/JS to prevent regular users from filling it.

A honeypot field can be used alone, but typically it will be used in conjunction with the input name rewrites setting, especially if you actually call it "username" (since EE and Simple Registration expects that to be the username).

If you call it something not used by EE / Simple Registration though you can use it alone.

Note, that if you don't want to set this as a global setting in the config file, it's also available as a parameter in the {exp:simple_registration:form} tag:

{exp:simple_registration:form honeypot="email"}

Input name rewrites

This setting is basically an array of "rewrites" telling Simple Registration that, in the registration form, the value for "username" can be found in "any-new-field-name" etc. You can rewrite as many input names as you want.